Vulgar, nasty and a roaring success - how football is a perfect symbol of what Britain

Last updated at 22:10 12 March 2008

What would you say was Britain's - or England's - most successful business?

Pharmaceuticals? Financial services? Maybe.

I'd say a strong case can be made for football, our national game.

You may not have noticed, or even care, that out of the eight clubs that have just made it into the last round of the European Champions League, four are English.

That may not sound like a big deal.

But if one considers that clubs from dozens of European countries are eligible, and that these countries collectively speak for hundreds of millions of people, it is interesting that half of the finalists should come from a single country - England - with a population of only 50 million.

Germany has one team out of the eight, Spain another. Italy and Turkey account for the other two. (France, note, has none.)

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And then there are Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal.

It is an amazing, unprecedented achievement.

I do not write as a football fanatic. My interest in the game is middling to low.

My point is only that the English Premier League is exceptional in producing many more "top teams" than any equivalent league in any other European country.

This undeniable success story has several disagreeable accompaniments. I suggest it is weirdly symbolic of what has happened to this country as a whole.

Twenty-five years ago, football was a failing industry.

Though one club, Liverpool, was very successful in Europe, the game was associated with crumbing stadiums, where you were quite likely to get your eyes torn out by opposing fans.

Attendances were falling, and many clubs lost money. Racism was widespread. In many respects, football was dismal and drab.

At the same time, the players - still mostly home-grown, and not particularly well paid - were not notorious for fouling or cheating on the field, or arguing the toss with the ref.

Off the field, unlike their highly paid modern counterparts, they were not generally to be found downing £200 bottles of Cristal champagne in the company of slappers, or clocking one another over the head.

Who would have guessed that this antiquated, still cloth-cap industry would transform itself so successfully that within 25 years American billionaires would be falling over each other to buy the most successful English teams?

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Revitalised by income from the Murdoch-owned Sky Sports satellite television channels, as well as from rising attendances, the biggest clubs have turned themselves, with one or two exceptions, into profitable, multi-million pound businesses with much improved, and sometimes brand-new, stadiums.

What has happened to English football partly mirrors what has happened to Britain, which 25 years ago was also a basket case.

Dyed-in-the-wool managements which had never heard of a budget have been replaced by slick professionals who may even have been to business school.

Tycoons now want to own clubs not so much for reasons of local pride or sentimental attachment as out of a desire to become even richer.

If only it stopped there, but it doesn't.

Football is a kind of caricature of our society as it is now organised.

It is efficiently run, prosperous and successful, but it can also be unedifying and nasty. For all its former shortcomings, one sometimes yearns for football as it was, rather than as it has become.

Premier League football exemplifies the widening gap in our society between the super rich and ordinary people.

As salaries have soared in the City to levels that would have been undreamt of a quarter of a century ago, so the pay of the most successful footballers has risen so far that many of them earn much more in a week than a typical fan does in a year.

A vulgar new aristocracy has been created, petted by the media, whose behaviour is frequently boorish.

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Whereas the top footballer of 30 years ago may have been content with a game of darts and a couple of pints in his local pub, his modern counterpart whiles away the hours in a lap-dancing club, or chasing after tarts and getting his name in the Sunday red-tops.

Violence has largely deserted the terraces and, oddly, seeped onto the pitch, so that "professional fouls", occasionally brutish, have become increasingly commonplace.

Footballers sometimes like to demonstrate their pugilistic skills outside the stadium, and once in a while, inflamed by drink, get done for GBH.

They can seem no better than - and no different from - the thugs in your local High Street on a Saturday night.

And along with ubiquitous greed, and endless examples of conspicuous consumption, has come corruption, with allegations of "bungs" and kickbacks that are the subject of investigations that never seem to lead anywhere.

Perhaps the most striking development of all is the globalisation of the game.

Whereas 25 years ago the players in a leading team would almost certainly be British, with a few of them coming from the town or city they represented, these days many of the top clubs field no more than one or two English players.

Liverpool, which won its place in the Champions League final eight on Tuesday evening, had only two English players in that winning team. Arsenal sometimes has none at all.

Most fans apparently think there is nothing odd about cheering on their "local" team, even though it is made up of Frenchmen, Nigerians, Croatians and anyone else you care to mention.

Perhaps they should be congratulated for their imaginative powers. One consequence, of course, is that fewer English players are in the top flight, and so England's team slips down the international rankings.

In the same year that four "English" teams have made it into the last eight of the Champions League, England's national team has failed to qualify for this summer's European Cup.

Just as the successful City is largely made up of foreign-owned banks employing increasing numbers of non-British employees, so our leading Premier League clubs are only British in the very loosest sense.

Three of the four English clubs in the finals are foreignowned, and the fourth, Arsenal, may soon become so. None has an English manager.

In the cause of maximising revenue, these clubs have embraced globalisation hook, line and sinker.

Hurrah? In many ways, no doubt.

Who will argue with success?

And yet this loss of local or even national identity in the Premier League is an extreme version of what has happened in our country.

Mass immigration is justified on the grounds of greater economic efficiency. One consequence, though, is the weakening of a sense of belonging.

As in football, so in life. Frankly, Arsenal might as well be a French club, though its fans apparently do not realise it.

No one can dispute that a failing industry has been turned into a roaring success. Just like Britain, in fact.

As with our country, though, a sometimes heavy price has been paid. Like it or loathe it, the Premier League is in many ways a symbol of what we have become.